Jewish, Muslim Groups Find Common Ground in Toronto
By Sheldon Gordon
Forward Correspondent
TORONTO - July 25, 2003 - In an effort to improve
relations between Muslims and Jews, Canada's Pakistani
community
has
created a journalism scholarship in memory of Daniel
Pearl, the Jewish reporter for The Wall Street Journal
who was murdered by Muslim extremists in Pakistan last
year.
It is the latest in a series of moves by Muslim and
Jewish groups intended to improve understanding of
each other's religious traditions and promote a common
political agenda on certain domestic issues. While
the communities remain divided over the Middle East
conflict, leaders have tried to find other areas where
they share common ground.
"The Middle East issue should not stop us as
Canadians from having a relationship," said Imam
Abdel Hai Patel, the University of Toronto's Muslim
chaplain and co-coordinator of the Islamic Council
of Imams-Canada. "We share a lot of things in
common. Many imams want dialogue."
The journalism scholarship will enable a Pakistani
student to come to Canada each year to study journalism
at Carleton University in Ottawa. Rana Syed, a Toronto-based
television producer of Pakistani origin, has said she
launched the scholarship as a "living memorial" to
Pearl. Speaking before an audience of Pakistani Canadians
at a sold-out fundraising dinner for the scholarship
last month, Syed recalled how Pearl was forced by his
captors to declare that he was a Jew immediately before
he was killed. "It was a vile and despicable moment," she
said.
Barbara Landau, Syed's friend and a co-leader of the
Canadian Association of Jews and Muslims, said of the
scholarship: "This was quite a thing for Rana
to have done, because she had her difficulties." There
was resistance from both the Jewish and Muslim communities,
Landau said.
Syed received e-mails and phone calls from some Pakistani
Canadians upset that she was not honoring "one
of their own." She defused resistance within her
own community by enlisting the support of Patel and
another respected cleric. To win support in the Jewish
community, she turned to the Canadian Jewish Congress,
which sent a representative to the fundraising dinner.
An estimated 350,000 Muslims and 180,000 Jews live
in the Toronto metropolitan area, and efforts to bring
the two communities together have been increasing recently.
Landau is organizing monthly Muslim-Jewish dialogues
at local synagogues. These interfaith meetings began
at Toronto's Temple Emanu-El following the September
11 terrorist attacks as an attempt to defuse an anti-Muslim
backlash; they have since spread to most of the city's
other Reform synagogues. "As more people hear
of it, more want to join in," Landau said.
The growing interaction between the two communities
is not limited merely to comparing notes on their respective
religious traditions and immigrant experiences. "We've
had a number of positive interactions with the Muslim
community" on initiatives to influence government
policy, said the Canadian Jewish Congress's national
director of community relations, Manuel Prutschi.
The Jewish congress has worked most closely with the
imams council, which is among the least politicized
of the Muslim groups. Last February, the imams council
endorsed a brief by the Jewish congress to a Canadian
Senate committee holding hearings on an animal-protection
bill. "We both wanted to make sure the bill didn't
inadvertently criminalize ritual slaughter," Prutschi
said.
The same month, Patel and a Jewish congress official
appeared together on a community cable television channel
to promote Project Ready, an initiative between the
police and the community to identify and respond effectively
to hate crimes.
Meanwhile, another Muslim organization, the Islamic
Society of North America (Canada), has joined with
the Jewish congress to support the Ontario provincial
government's controversial tax credit for taxpayers
who send their children to religious day schools. The
head of the Islamic society previously participated
in an interfaith rally organized by the Jewish congress
to protest the arrest of 13 Jews in Iran on espionage
charges.
The Jewish congress recently urged federal government
support for plans by the Aga Khan, spiritual leader
of the Shiite Ismaili community, to establish a "pluralism
center" in Canada. The center will draw on the
Canadian experience to help developing countries promote
pluralism in their institutions, laws and policies.
Inter-community alliances, however, are still sometimes
tenuous. The Jewish congress and the Canadian Islamic
Congress worked together to champion Canadian military
intervention in Kosovo, but the Jewish congress said
the relationship has collapsed over the Islamic congress's
outspoken support for the Palestinian intifada. The
final straw for the Jewish group came when the Islamic
congress gave a community service award to a local
newspaper that endorses Hamas and Hezbollah.
Muslim leaders, for their part, are dismayed that
the Jewish congress and B'nai Brith Canada stayed largely
mum on racial profiling of Muslim Canadians by the
security services after the September 11 attacks. "The
two organizations are well-respected," said the
Islamic congress's president, Mohamed Elmasry. "If
they had said this is unjust and contrary to Canadian
values, I think it would have had a strong impact on
anti-Islam [prejudice] in the country."
Nonetheless, said Elmasry, occasional tensions are
not necessarily a cause for alarm. "Relations
between the two communities are normal," he said. "You
expect two faith groups to have issues where they agree
and work together, and others where they disagree.
We have disagreements with the churches, too."
B'nai Brith Canada, however, is disillusioned with
the results yielded by conciliatory overtures to the
Muslim community. "We've done outreach to them,
and it didn't get us very far," said B'nai Brith's
president, Rochelle Wilner. "The first thing we'd
like to hear is the imams in Canada decrying what the
imams in the Middle East have been saying about Jews."
Patel, however, prefers to steer clear of the Middle
East minefield. "Discussion of the issue may not
be helpful," he said. "We can't solve this
issue in Canada."
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